The Laughing Heart

your life is your life

don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

be on the watch.

there are ways out.

there is a light somewhere.

it may not be much light but

it beats the darkness.

be on the watch.

the gods will offer you chances.

know them.

take them.

you can’t beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

and the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

your life is your life.

know it while you have it.

you are marvelous

the gods wait to delight

in you.

-Charles Bukowski

N.B: Each day we all face some heartache- ranging from a broken heart or the death of a loved one, to the massacre of a beloved team or the chipping of a fresh manicure. And while some of us strain towards that glimmer of light, there are those who succumb to the darkness and choose to end it all, leaving behind a thousand "if only"s.

If only...  

Depp and stuff

Back in hostel, we devoured romance novels and I discovered a wildly impractical romantic side of myself. My favourite fantasy then was to be forced into marriage to some nasty old reprobate and, on the wedding day, the man I'm secretly in love with would come riding up on an old scooter and abduct me from the altar (I had also recently watched "The Graduate" around this time). Then we would pretend to be Chinese immigrants and move to Ireland..no wait, I was in love with New Orleans then, so yeah, we would move to New Orleans and open a Dim-Sum Restaurant, okay, okay, I admit I never really thought about what comes after the abduction.

Anyway, my roommate, who had always been disgustingly unromantic, tried to dissuade me from ever fulfilling this fantasy. "Think of the shame that your parents would feel". "Serves them right for forcing me to marry some disgusting man that I don't love". "Your'e not even allowed to have boyfriends yet, so why would they force you to marry anyone anyway?" "This will be after I'm all grown up". "Why did the man you love wait until the last minute to abduct you? If he truly loves you too, he would have abducted you long before". "Maybe he didn't know that I love him". "And why didn't you just say 'no' to your parents? Why would you meekly let yourself be forced into marrying someone you don't love?" "Shut up".

Fast forward ten years and ironically, my unromantic ex-roomie is the one finding herself caught between two men, and I'm the one trying to be all practical. She says she loves the man she's with, but she' also thinks she's in love with another man she met recently. 

"Johnny Depp says, 'If you love two people at the same time, choose the second one because, if you really loved the first one, you wouldn't have fallen for the second'".

"He's a friggin Hollywood actor, what does he know?"

"But what if its true?"

"Do you really love this second guy? Maybe you just like the thrill of possibly being with someone new. Would you miss your boyfriend if you broke up?"

"I would dieee"

"Then just let the other guy go"

"But I would also dieee". 

So, faced with the knowledge that my old practical friend has been possessed by a drama queenish, romantic demon and that she's also going to die, I decided to change the subject and we ended up chatting about Johnny Depp. 

'Course I ended up thinking about this "being in love with two people at the same time" thing, and where I had once thought that it's impossible, now that so many people are claiming to do the very impossible, I ruled that perhaps, it wasn't quite as impossible as I had thought.

We are all complex beings and I guess its possible to be simultaneously in love with two people who appeal to different facets of yourself. But what happens when you have to choose between the two, as you inevitably will have to do? 

I don't know the answer to this so I'll fall back on Johnny Depp again. And this awesome music video where I first fell in love with him. 

Lawdy, aint he the cutest thing?

Rainy day ramblings

I love this weather- heavy mists, incessant drizzle, howling winds. Never mind that I have a pile of soggy laundry gathering up a light stink. When your'e relatively jobless and cooped at home, this kind of weather is the best. Endless cups of hot red tea, a book, thick socks, Joshua Radin (for now) and the prospect of a visit from the bf (I'll cross the Sahara for you, swim the Atlantic for you..I'll come see you if it stops raining) is all that's needed.

Lately, I've been too lazy, or rather uninspired to update my blog. I've been vaguely thinking about how they said artists suffer for their art. And I've come to the conclusion that when one is too content, it becomes horribly easy to be un-creative. And I am- too content and un-creative. Not that I'm saying I'm an artist- but when I first started this blog, I was undergoing an early mid-life crisis, so my blog became sort of an outlet for me, and now that I'm so smugly content, I've been neglecting this little outlet. I think artists deliberately starve themselves in their dinky garrets just so they would be forced to create art to escape from the squalor of their surroundings and the tumult in their minds.

Rodi got married and she moved to Bangalore. Jamie's is looming. We're truly happy for them, but we're also feeling melancholy as heck because our little circle of friends will never be the same again. No more weekend bed-ins at Rodi's or Jamie's. I guess this is why Npi and Apuii have become so strangely possessive- Npi interrogates me upon every SMS I receive, and Apuii throws a sulk-fit when we order MaryKay products from someone else other than her. I suppose in a way we're all trying to hold on to "us" in some way.

My happiest moments were those days when "attending classes" consisted of spending the whole day at Big Bang Restaurant and playing "Bonus". Magic happens when you throw in a gaggle of girls, a deck of cards, a roughbook and a pen. When someone lags behind in points, we would draw a stick figure hanging himself from a tree branch near the laggard's name. Then, amazingly, her points would start to come up. On the rare occasions that the hangman failed, we would make lightning strike that tree. And that was a sure-fire points upper. Pure magic.

Yes, change happens. Life doesn't always turn out the way you expect it to, but that's not a bad thing. It's cold, so I'm going to snuggle with my little nephew. One day, maybe I'll have one of my own, and Id be waiting not for the bf to come visit, but for the husband to come home. And I won't mind at all. This from a girl who once swore she was never going to go down that domestic route. No, change isn't a bad thing at all.

And hence the reason why I'm sooo smugly content :)